Thorsten Pachur
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1662691 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Thorsten Pachur |
| PRENOMES | Thorsten |
| SOBRENOME | Pachur |
| ASSINATURA | PACHUR T |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Max Planck Institute for Human Development |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6391-4107 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Real-world estimation taps into basic numeric abilities
Accurately estimating and assessing real-world quantities (e.g., how long it will take to get to the train station; the calorie content of a meal) is a central skill for adaptive cognition. To date, theoretical and empirical work on the mental resources recruited by real-world estimation has focused primarily on the role of domain knowledge (e.g., knowledge of the metric and distributional properties of objects in a domain). Here we examined the …
How sampling strategies shape experience-based risky choice
Hallmark phenomena of risky choice, such as risk aversion and deviations from expected value (EV) maximization, are commonly modeled with psychoeconomic curves (e.g., utility function, probability weighting function). Yet these functions describe choices rather than the cognitive processes that generate them. Here, we examine how aspects of the oft-neglected process of information search - in particular, switching between options during sampling …
Managing children’s asthma
Objective Pediatric asthma management is challenging for parents and guardians (hereafter caregivers). We examined (1) how caregivers mentally represent trigger and symptom management strategies, and (2) how those mental representations are associated with actual management behavior.Methods In an online survey, N = 431 caregivers of children with asthma rated 20 trigger management behaviors and 20 symptom management behaviors across 15 characteri…
How are mental representations of asthma triggers and symptoms related to interpersonal risk perceptions? A psychometric investigation of caregivers of children with asthma
Objective Parents and guardians (hereafter caregivers) make decisions for their children’s medical care. However, many caregivers of children with asthma struggle to understand their child’s illness. We used the psychometric paradigm to investigate how caregivers conceptualize, or mentally represent, asthma triggers and symptoms and how these representations are linked to perceived asthma exacerbation risk.Methods We asked 377 caregivers of child…
Does Time Pressure Alter the Affect Gap in Risky Choice
People often exhibit systematic differences in their risky choices when decisions elicit high anticipatory affect compared to choices that are relatively affect‐poor—typically showing lower decision quality and greater risk aversion. This affect gap can be modeled by assuming that people use a compensatory strategy (i.e., a strategy that weighs outcomes against their probability of occurring) in affect‐poor choices, but a simple non‐compensatory …
The perception of dramatic risks
In their famous study on risk judgments, Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978) concluded that people tend to overestimate the frequencies of dramatic causes of death (e.g., homicide, tornado) and underestimate the frequencies of nondramatic ones (e.g., diabetes, heart disease). Further, their analyses of newspapers indicated that dramatic risks are overrepresented in the media-suggesting that people's distorted risk perception…
Attribute attention and option attention in risky choice
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand t…
Strategy selection in decisions from givens
The intuitive conceptualization and perception of variance
How is the hypothesis space represented? Evidence from young children’s active search and predictions in a multiple-cue inference task
To successfully navigate an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., wind speed, atmospheric pressure) and outcomes (e.g., rain). When learning, it is possible to actively manipulate the cue values to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds actively learned cue-outcome relationships, and what their behavior revealed about how they represented the hyp…
Good + Bad = ? Developmental Differences in Balancing Gains and Losses in Value-Based Decisions From Memory
Value-based decisions often involve comparisons between benefits and costs that must be retrieved from memory. To investigate the development of value-based decisions, 9- to 10-year olds (N = 30), 11- to 12-year olds (N = 30), and young adults (N = 30) first learned to associate gain and loss magnitudes with symbols. In a subsequent decision task, participants rapidly evaluated objects that consisted of combinations of these symbols. All age grou…
Does option complexity contribute to the framing effect, loss aversion, and delay discounting in younger and older adults
Recent findings suggest that the commonly observed preference for a safe over a risky option, which is more pronounced in older than in younger adults, is largely driven by differences in the complexity of those options. Here we examine whether option complexity also contributes to the emergence of the framing effect and loss aversion in risky choice as well as to delay discounting in intertemporal choice. All of these phenomena tend to be measur…
The attention–aversion gap
The gap between medical and monetary choices under risk persists in decisions for others
Decisions under risk in the medical domain have been found to systematically diverge from decisions in the monetary domain. When making choices between monetary options, people commonly rely on a decision strategy that trades off outcomes with their probabilities; when making choices between medical options, people tend to neglect probability information. In two experimental studies, we tested to what extent differences between medical and moneta…
Too good to be true? Psychological responses to uncommon options in risk–reward environments
Risks and rewards, or payoffs and probabilities, are inversely related in many choice environments. We investigated people's psychological responses to uncommon combinations of risk and reward that deviate from learned regularities (e.g., options that offer a high payoff with an unusually high probability) as they evaluated risky options. In two experiments ( N = 183), participants first priced monetary gambles drawn from environments in which ri…
Who's biased? A meta-analysis of buyer-seller differences in the pricing of lotteries
How Well Do We Know Our Inner Daredevil? Probing the Relationship Between Self‐Report and Behavioral Measures of Risk Taking
To measure a person's risk‐taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self‐report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each other. We examined the relationship between self‐report likelihood ratings for risky choice in a monetar…
The Seller's Sense
Previous work comparing pricing decisions by buyers and sellers has primarily focused on the endowment effect, the phenomenon that selling prices exceed buying prices. Here, we examine whether pricing decisions by buyers and sellers also vary in sensitivity to differences between objects' expected values (EVs). Both a loss‐aversion account (which posits that losses are weighted more heavily than gains) and a loss‐attention account (which posits i…
The development of adaptive decision making
Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment, particularly the predictive power (validity) of recognition. Little is known about developmental differences in…
Heuristics, History of
Risk‐Taking Tendencies in Prisoners and Nonprisoners
Several investigations have found that prisoners are more likely than nonprisoners to engage in risky behavior, which may contribute to their propensity to commit criminal offenses. However, this research has been limited by an almost exclusive focus on male samples. Given the established link between risk taking and gender, it is thus unclear how findings on the risk‐taking propensities of prisoners also hold in women. The present study uses bot…
Decisions from Experience
The description–experience gap refers to the robust finding that learning about uncertain options via description or experience results in systematically different choices. This gap has previously been studied primarily with monetary gambles. Here, we examine search and choice processes in decisions from experience involving medical outcomes (side effects of medication). We compare these processes both to decisions from experience involving monet…
How Affect Shapes Risky Choice
People's choices between prospects with relatively affect‐rich outcomes (e.g., medical side effects) can diverge markedly from their choices between prospects with relatively affect‐poor outcomes (e.g., monetary losses). We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this “affect gap” in risky choice. One possibility is that affect‐rich prospects give rise to more distortion in probability weighting. Another is that they lead to the neglect o…
Selection of Decision Strategies After Conscious and Unconscious Thought
It is commonly assumed that the use of simple, non‐compensatory strategies is especially pronounced in memory‐based decisions, where information costs are high. At the same time, there is evidence that in memory‐based decisions, a compensatory processing of attributes is facilitated when the processing occurs unconsciously rather than consciously. We applied a strategy classification approach—developed in research on non‐compensatory heuristics—t…
How Affect Shapes Risky Choice
People's choices between prospects with relatively affect‐rich outcomes (e.g., medical side effects) can diverge markedly from their choices between prospects with relatively affect‐poor outcomes (e.g., monetary losses). We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this “affect gap” in risky choice. One possibility is that affect‐rich prospects give rise to more distortion in probability weighting. Another is that they lead to the neglect o…
Strategy Selection in Risky Choice
Real‐world decisions often involve options with outcomes that are uncertain and trigger strong affect (e.g., side effects of a drug). Previous work suggests that when choosing among affect‐rich risky prospects, people are rather insensitive to probability information, potentially compromising decision quality. We modeled the strategies of less and more numerate participants in the United States and in Germany when choosing between affect‐rich pro…
Decisions from Experience
The description–experience gap refers to the robust finding that learning about uncertain options via description or experience results in systematically different choices. This gap has previously been studied primarily with monetary gambles. Here, we examine search and choice processes in decisions from experience involving medical outcomes (side effects of medication). We compare these processes both to decisions from experience involving monet…
The development of adaptive decision making
Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment, particularly the predictive power (validity) of recognition. Little is known about developmental differences in…
The recognition heuristic in memory‐based inference
The recognition heuristic makes the strong claim that probabilistic inferences in which a recognized object is compared to an unrecognized one are made solely on the basis of whether the objects are recognized or not, ignoring all other available cues. This claim has been seriously challenged by a number of studies that have shown a clear effect of additional cue knowledge. In most of these studies, either recognition knowledge was acquired durin…
Selection of Decision Strategies After Conscious and Unconscious Thought
It is commonly assumed that the use of simple, non‐compensatory strategies is especially pronounced in memory‐based decisions, where information costs are high. At the same time, there is evidence that in memory‐based decisions, a compensatory processing of attributes is facilitated when the processing occurs unconsciously rather than consciously. We applied a strategy classification approach—developed in research on non‐compensatory heuristics—t…
Does option complexity contribute to the framing effect, loss aversion, and delay discounting in younger and older adults
Recent findings suggest that the commonly observed preference for a safe over a risky option, which is more pronounced in older than in younger adults, is largely driven by differences in the complexity of those options. Here we examine whether option complexity also contributes to the emergence of the framing effect and loss aversion in risky choice as well as to delay discounting in intertemporal choice. All of these phenomena tend to be measur…
The gap between medical and monetary choices under risk persists in decisions for others
Decisions under risk in the medical domain have been found to systematically diverge from decisions in the monetary domain. When making choices between monetary options, people commonly rely on a decision strategy that trades off outcomes with their probabilities; when making choices between medical options, people tend to neglect probability information. In two experimental studies, we tested to what extent differences between medical and moneta…
How Well Do We Know Our Inner Daredevil? Probing the Relationship Between Self‐Report and Behavioral Measures of Risk Taking
To measure a person's risk‐taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self‐report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each other. We examined the relationship between self‐report likelihood ratings for risky choice in a monetar…
The Seller's Sense
Previous work comparing pricing decisions by buyers and sellers has primarily focused on the endowment effect, the phenomenon that selling prices exceed buying prices. Here, we examine whether pricing decisions by buyers and sellers also vary in sensitivity to differences between objects' expected values (EVs). Both a loss‐aversion account (which posits that losses are weighted more heavily than gains) and a loss‐attention account (which posits i…
Risk‐Taking Tendencies in Prisoners and Nonprisoners
Several investigations have found that prisoners are more likely than nonprisoners to engage in risky behavior, which may contribute to their propensity to commit criminal offenses. However, this research has been limited by an almost exclusive focus on male samples. Given the established link between risk taking and gender, it is thus unclear how findings on the risk‐taking propensities of prisoners also hold in women. The present study uses bot…
Intuitive judgments of social statistics
The recognition heuristic in memory‐based inference
The recognition heuristic makes the strong claim that probabilistic inferences in which a recognized object is compared to an unrecognized one are made solely on the basis of whether the objects are recognized or not, ignoring all other available cues. This claim has been seriously challenged by a number of studies that have shown a clear effect of additional cue knowledge. In most of these studies, either recognition knowledge was acquired durin…
From Meehl to Fast and Frugal Heuristics (and Back)
It is difficult to overestimate Paul Meehl's influence on judgment and decision-making research. His `disturbing little book' (Meehl, 1986, p. 370) Clinical versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence (1954) is known as an attack on human judgment and a call for replacing clinicians with actuarial methods. More than 40 years later, fast and frugal heuristics—proposed as models of human judgment—were formaliz…
Heuristics
How do people make decisions when time is limited, information unreliable, and the future uncertain? This book tells how based on the work of Herbert Simon, the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group has developed a research programme on simple heuristics, also known as fast and frugal heuristics.
Strategy Selection in Risky Choice
Real‐world decisions often involve options with outcomes that are uncertain and trigger strong affect (e.g., side effects of a drug). Previous work suggests that when choosing among affect‐rich risky prospects, people are rather insensitive to probability information, potentially compromising decision quality. We modeled the strategies of less and more numerate participants in the United States and in Germany when choosing between affect‐rich pro…
Selection of Decision Strategies After Conscious and Unconscious Thought
It is commonly assumed that the use of simple, non‐compensatory strategies is especially pronounced in memory‐based decisions, where information costs are high. At the same time, there is evidence that in memory‐based decisions, a compensatory processing of attributes is facilitated when the processing occurs unconsciously rather than consciously. We applied a strategy classification approach—developed in research on non‐compensatory heuristics—t…
Intuitive judgments of social statistics
Heuristics, History of
Risk‐Taking Tendencies in Prisoners and Nonprisoners
Several investigations have found that prisoners are more likely than nonprisoners to engage in risky behavior, which may contribute to their propensity to commit criminal offenses. However, this research has been limited by an almost exclusive focus on male samples. Given the established link between risk taking and gender, it is thus unclear how findings on the risk‐taking propensities of prisoners also hold in women. The present study uses bot…
Decisions from Experience
The description–experience gap refers to the robust finding that learning about uncertain options via description or experience results in systematically different choices. This gap has previously been studied primarily with monetary gambles. Here, we examine search and choice processes in decisions from experience involving medical outcomes (side effects of medication). We compare these processes both to decisions from experience involving monet…
How Affect Shapes Risky Choice
People's choices between prospects with relatively affect‐rich outcomes (e.g., medical side effects) can diverge markedly from their choices between prospects with relatively affect‐poor outcomes (e.g., monetary losses). We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this “affect gap” in risky choice. One possibility is that affect‐rich prospects give rise to more distortion in probability weighting. Another is that they lead to the neglect o…
How Well Do We Know Our Inner Daredevil? Probing the Relationship Between Self‐Report and Behavioral Measures of Risk Taking
To measure a person's risk‐taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self‐report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each other. We examined the relationship between self‐report likelihood ratings for risky choice in a monetar…
The Seller's Sense
Previous work comparing pricing decisions by buyers and sellers has primarily focused on the endowment effect, the phenomenon that selling prices exceed buying prices. Here, we examine whether pricing decisions by buyers and sellers also vary in sensitivity to differences between objects' expected values (EVs). Both a loss‐aversion account (which posits that losses are weighted more heavily than gains) and a loss‐attention account (which posits i…
The development of adaptive decision making
Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment, particularly the predictive power (validity) of recognition. Little is known about developmental differences in…
Who's biased? A meta-analysis of buyer-seller differences in the pricing of lotteries
The attention–aversion gap
The gap between medical and monetary choices under risk persists in decisions for others
Decisions under risk in the medical domain have been found to systematically diverge from decisions in the monetary domain. When making choices between monetary options, people commonly rely on a decision strategy that trades off outcomes with their probabilities; when making choices between medical options, people tend to neglect probability information. In two experimental studies, we tested to what extent differences between medical and moneta…
Too good to be true? Psychological responses to uncommon options in risk–reward environments
Risks and rewards, or payoffs and probabilities, are inversely related in many choice environments. We investigated people's psychological responses to uncommon combinations of risk and reward that deviate from learned regularities (e.g., options that offer a high payoff with an unusually high probability) as they evaluated risky options. In two experiments ( N = 183), participants first priced monetary gambles drawn from environments in which ri…
Good + Bad = ? Developmental Differences in Balancing Gains and Losses in Value-Based Decisions From Memory
Value-based decisions often involve comparisons between benefits and costs that must be retrieved from memory. To investigate the development of value-based decisions, 9- to 10-year olds (N = 30), 11- to 12-year olds (N = 30), and young adults (N = 30) first learned to associate gain and loss magnitudes with symbols. In a subsequent decision task, participants rapidly evaluated objects that consisted of combinations of these symbols. All age grou…
Does option complexity contribute to the framing effect, loss aversion, and delay discounting in younger and older adults
Recent findings suggest that the commonly observed preference for a safe over a risky option, which is more pronounced in older than in younger adults, is largely driven by differences in the complexity of those options. Here we examine whether option complexity also contributes to the emergence of the framing effect and loss aversion in risky choice as well as to delay discounting in intertemporal choice. All of these phenomena tend to be measur…
The intuitive conceptualization and perception of variance
How is the hypothesis space represented? Evidence from young children’s active search and predictions in a multiple-cue inference task
To successfully navigate an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., wind speed, atmospheric pressure) and outcomes (e.g., rain). When learning, it is possible to actively manipulate the cue values to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds actively learned cue-outcome relationships, and what their behavior revealed about how they represented the hyp…
Strategy selection in decisions from givens
Attribute attention and option attention in risky choice
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand t…
The perception of dramatic risks
In their famous study on risk judgments, Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978) concluded that people tend to overestimate the frequencies of dramatic causes of death (e.g., homicide, tornado) and underestimate the frequencies of nondramatic ones (e.g., diabetes, heart disease). Further, their analyses of newspapers indicated that dramatic risks are overrepresented in the media-suggesting that people's distorted risk perception…
Psychology (24 obras) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (22 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Cognitive psychology (14 obras) · Social Psychology (14 obras) · Mathematics (11 obras) · Social Psychology (11 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (9 obras) · Cognition (8 obras) · Economics (8 obras)